We have three accounts with the same bank - a mortgage, an equity line, and a checking account. Last week, we received a telephone message.

Please call Mrs. Snow at TheBank, 800-555-0123

Uh huh. Well. That was surely a wealth of information (not).

So Rich called the number... Voice maze. Was it TheBank? Was it a clever forgery?

Next, he asked me for a bank statement... I gave him one of each. None of the 800 numbers matched of course.

Rich picked an 800 number (largely at random) from one of the statements and dialed. When he finally reached a human, that human couldn't find the original number (from the message) in any data base. That's not to say it wasn't a legitimate bank number, of course, but... how can you tell?